Why is it that only a few cities and regions around the world have become successful innovation hubs, even though many have tried? For the last few years I have been intrigued by this question.
Silicon Valley and the Boston-Cambridge area are among the most prominent such innovation hubs in the world. Their leading positions as technology-based innovation centers have been near impossible to replicate. Others have tried to become the Next Silicon Valley. A few of these efforts have achieved modest success, but most have fallen short of their goals.
Why is it so difficult? The reasons are varied. The prominence of Silicon Valley and the Boston-Cambridge area is closely related to the great engineering universities in their midst – Stanford and UC Berkeley, and MIT, respectively. It clearly takes quite a long time to build such world class universities.
Original Article: Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Evolution of Cities
